


Your Nearest, Your Dog Star

by signalbeam



Category: Gunnerkrigg Court
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-07
Updated: 2013-12-07
Packaged: 2018-01-03 22:32:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1073825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Annie in the coffee shop AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Nearest, Your Dog Star

Coyote plants a Ysengrin in the ground in front of Gunnerkrigg Court Coffee, in the middle of her shift. There is a plucking sound in the ether and when Annie turns around, Ysengrin is waist-deep in the asphalt. 

It’s mid-afternoon, after the last of the lunch-time stragglers and before the office workers get off. She’s already served the only customer in the shop; Andrew is doing inventory and will be back in ten; Parley will be here after classes are out. She looks to Jones. Jones nods her head. Or a wind blows and carries her hair, in synchronous motion, up and then down and gives the impression of nodding. Whatever. It’s good enough for her. 

She steps out of the shop and says, “I’m not making you a latte, Coyote!” 

“I didn’t come to make you work,” Coyote says. His snout bends like a paperclip tormented by a bored student. “I came to give you something to do.” 

She looks over at Ysengrin. He stares back. For the first time they are eye-to-eye—or at least, eye-to-eye with both feet on the ground. Ysengrin, like a stunted, doggish tree. He doesn’t fight or struggle with Coyote so near. No doubt she could crown him with tinsel and mistletoe without as much as one of his fish-breathed sighs. 

“You are now entertained,” Coyote says. His stripes lift up to waggle over each of his many eyes. “Haha! When will you come work for me? When you are done digging the old fool from the ground, make him bring you to me. I will teach you how to make bitter medicine.” 

“What? You’d make me do more work as a reward for work?” Annie says. 

His smile extends across the length of his back. 

Ysengrin says, “It will be good for you to know.” 

“Shut up. Stay there for another ten hours. I will be busy tonight.” 

There are no shovels in the coffee shop. Jones comes out and does the work herself: slides two fingertips in the gap between Ysengrin’s fur and the asphalt, and curls her fingers. It crumbles like blue cheese, but generally browner. While Jones crushes the road with her hands, Annie leans on Ysengrin’s wood-rope shoulder and pats his head. 

By the time it’s rush hour, they’ve freed one of his arms, and use that to haul the rest of him out; his unhappy shame burns her cheeks, turns them red. She thinks about Coyote blotting the moon out with her thumb, the way he laughed when she came back to his shop the next day and demanded that he put the moon back the way he found it. All in good fun, he says. And who cares about astronomers, anyway?

“I will take you to Coyote’s shop tomorrow,” Ysengrin says. By now half of the Court is out of work and are stopped in front of their shop. “If you still wish to come.” 

“I do,” Annie says. Ysengrin, in his normal form, blots the sun out with his one ear. Her neck strains from the effort of meeting his eyes. As he leaves, she and Jones work on filling the hole again, Jones with her dusty hands and Annie with the ether. “Jones,” she says, with her actual mouth—oops, she’s scattering bits of sidewalk everywhere. “Why does Ysengrin let Coyote do that to him?” 

“Brainwashing and conditioning.” 

“Oh.” She expected a spiel about love. “Is it that simple?” 

Jones doesn’t answer at first. She is probably filing this away in her head somewhere to use as a teaching point when the shift ends, as a way to explain managerial style or why Annie should smile and nod and pretend to believe people when they say they’ve forgotten their membership card. Annie picks at the rocks and the stones around her feet and kicks some into the hole. 

“I know my mother died for love,” Annie offers. 

“She wouldn’t have been the first,” she says. Rats. She hoped for a better answer. But she guesses digging Ysengrin out has made her less inclined to indulge Annie than before. 

They wash their hands in the sink and shake the dust from their aprons. Annie’s arms are pale brown at the elbows and pinkish everywhere else. Just as she turns back to the sink, Jones puts a hand on her shoulder. Jones casts a dark shadow on Annie and her face, from this close, is enormous and so unlike any other human face she has seen: the clear boundaries of her flesh, as though someone had carved her features with a pen nib and a flat, wooden edge. “Antimony,” she says. “Love is not a power you can use against someone.” 

It’s not something that makes sense to her then and doesn’t until, some time later, she is wearing Coyote around her neck like a scarf with his breath on her spine. Tell me a story about me, he says, a story your mother told you about me. A story about Coyote? She looks up at the clouded sky. There is the story of the dog fallen in a hole. There is the story of a girl pushing her thumb into the moon. There is the story of the girl again, younger, with her head in her mother's lap, watching the spirits wait for her mother at the door of Good Hope, waiting for the day or the hour or the month, as her mother tells her how Coyote once ate the sun for the sake of turning a girl’s tears into snow. 


End file.
